A User Interface (UI) scripting language defines the layout of UI components on the output of a computing device. Typical components of the UI might be menus, buttons or check boxes. For each component there is usually additional information such as position, size, color and textual or pictorial content.
Typically, as with other types of scripting languages, a UI written in a block structured UI scripting language is often hand-authored to include the desired components for display and the layout of those components. However, hand-authoring the UI limits the UI to the components and the layout defined at the time of authoring creating difficulties in adding certain dynamic data to the UI. For example, a set of links to web pages may be included on the UI that are dynamic and generated from an external source (e.g., a server) at run time. Run time is defined as the time during which the User Interface component is being displayed or used. Custom code could be written and then spliced into the UI for displaying the dynamic data, but this method may be cumbersome and difficult in a block structured scripting language. What is needed is a way to update data from an external data source in a block structured UI scripting language without requiring the use of custom code.